Network-provided content, such as Internet web pages or media content such as video, pictures, music, and the like, are typically served to end users via networked computer systems. End user requests for the network content are processed and the content is responsively provided over various network links. These networked computer systems can include origin hosting servers which originally host network content of content creators or originators, such as web servers for hosting a news website. However, these computer systems of individual content creators can become overloaded and slow due to frequent requests of content by end users.
Content delivery networks have been developed which add a layer of caching between origin servers and end users. The content delivery networks typically have one or more cache nodes distributed across a large geographic region to provide lower latency access to the content for the end users. When end users request content, such as a web page, which is handled through a cache node, the cache node is configured to respond to the end user requests instead of the origin servers. Content delivery networks can also support Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), which has been established to overcome some of the shortcomings with IPv4, namely total address space limitations as well as other protocol limitations. IPv6 incorporates a 128-bit address instead of the 32-bit address of IPv4, and IPv6 has now been implemented in most network routing equipment.
In some instances, end user devices may be configured to “attack” content delivery equipment by repeatedly and frequently requesting content from a content provider, or cause the equipment to process many content-related tasks at once, among other operations. For example, during a network bot attack, a denial of service (DoS) attack, or a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, one or more end user devices can request network content at a frequent pace so as to overload or crash network equipment. In cases where an origin server alone serves the network content, the origin server can quickly become overloaded by the frequent content requests and crash. Cache nodes can alleviate the burden on origin servers to defend against these attacks, however, cache nodes can have difficulty in blocking traffic related to attacks.